Posts Tagged ‘forgiveness’

Here’s more of Stephen Dunn, once again, from my reading today. These are the opening words to a chapter titled, “The Hand Reaching Into the Crowd.” We live in a graceless age. Accordingly the word grace (in its various parts of speech) has lost power and significance, though it is frequently used. We have...

It’s the end of the grading term at school, the students are frantically trying to finish the rough drafts of their research papers, I’m faced with grade reports – so I spent my free period reading poetry. This morning as I left the house, I picked up my well-worn copy of Poems to Live...

The lectionary passage today was Matthew’s account of Jesus being tempted in the desert. In Reading Jesus, Mary Gordon talks about Jesus’ experience in the desert demonstrating how he was growing into who he was becoming, which stuck with me. sunday sonnet #21 He had been forty days without foodwhen the Tempter showed up...

Ash Wednesday showed up early for me this year because I was given the chance, thanks to my friends Lori and Terry, to hear Garrison Keillor tell stories. Though I have listened to him on the radio for thirty years, I’ve never heard him live. Monday, he showed up unadorned, without any of his...

I have to admit I didn’t know it was a hymn the first time I heard it. I was in tenth grade, living in Fort Worth, Texas during our year of leave from the mission field (as they used to say) and completely taken with American popular radio. It was the year of “American...

I managed to avoid the mall this season until today. I had to go because that’s where the stuff I needed was being kept (Ginger and Jay were going, too), so, as long as we were going, we decided at least part of the afternoon should be spent at the movies; we saw Invictus....

My friend Gordon has been telling the story of his church in San Antonio at his blog at at the High Calling website. Part of the story is about the pastor who preceded him — a friend of many of us – who was amazingly gifted at offering grace to others that he was...

I know what it’s like to becaught up in your own world —I go to work in a windowlesskitchen and stay there all day(there’s a lot to do)my world quickly becomesabout my world unlesssomeone bursts in or I break out is that what happened to you? is that how you decided youdeserved the bonuses...

I must begin with an update on James, our music director, who was in a car accident a week ago last Saturday in which he escaped from a burning car and sustained smoke inhalation injuries. The doctors kept him heavily sedated and intubated for much of the week while they, for lack of a...

I managed to make it through most all of the holiday season with only one or two trips to the mall. Online shopping allowed me the luxury of avoiding the experience of standing in front of the large lighted mall map, trying to figure out how to find a particular purveyor, which also means...